I entered this LD21 with my own additional theme : “No level Generator”.

I’m designing game for a long time now and I have always eluded the leveldesign problem by programming levelgenerator for any game. Breakout generators, sokoban generator, shmup generator, etc.
I was pretty proud of it. Knowing that my game have sort of infinite ammount of levels feels powerful and trying to make them fun althought they were not craft-handed was challenging.

Back when I was 14, My iconic game was Frontier Elite 2. I had no clue what a random seed was, but having a universe on my 3.5 floppy disk sounds magic !

When I started to read the LumdumDare blog, I was surprised by the time spent on leveldesign. Filling a .txt file with “O” and “X” was the kind of thing I totally wiped of my mind. It feels like and old age thing.

That’s a very twisted point of view, but I cant help thinking like this

Enough with the psychoanalysis, what about the game ?

In Rainbow Jail I tried to design the level instead of procedurally poping block and baddies by reversing puzzle solution.

and… Hell, it’s hard work !

For manually designing these kind of puzzle, you have to think hard ! First you have to make some easy level. Not only player must achieve them by doing almost anything, but they must feel like they made some wise move to do it. After that, more challenging levels. For achieving this, you have to test.

A lot.

And I’m awful a this too.

Spending all my time playing my own 48h game seems like a nonsense.

The hope : A Solver !!

So of course, I want to create a a LevelSolver that will check for me the ammount of solution for the current level so I can, just by blindly add or remove block, navigate between 0 & infinite number of solutions until I reach the “only 1 path” holy grail.
Well that would still be leveldesign, but it seriously take the generator twist. And moreover dealing with the fact that player can push some blocks ( sokoban factor ) is not making it easy.

Back to reality

I had to face the harsh reality. For every single level, I will have to check

•   is my level possible to finish ?
•   is my level fun ?
•   is my level erhh.. beautifull ?
•   is my 12 move ultra-smart solution is not overlaped by a 2 move solution I didn’t notice ?

I did my best and I think the result sucks

The problems :

• My urge for quantity over quality made me add those grey dots (random color block  ) so I can easily create enough room for my game. Most of these levels are untested and boring.
• Not enough testing : maybe 10% of the room are truly tested. It turned out that making a good level take me 30-45minutes. I should have spend 6-8h on 12 good level instead of this zelda-ish interconnected room map.

The good sides :

• Creating an ambiance for your game is easier with a manually drawn map, I could for example create some kind of jail look level.
• Thinking and testing each of your level really shorten the distance between you and the player.
• Testing specific features of the game is easier : Just draw the situation and test it !

I wish I could design fantastic puzzle like chocolate castle, or better,  mix procedural generation and leveldesign to produce gem like spelunky…

Well you can’t become a good leveldesigner in 48h, but a sure thing is the LD competition help me to progress in this way !